Communications as Hyperstition

Reality Engineering in the Age of the Dark Forest

The following is a thinking-out-loud attempt to prompt coherence into several ideas I keep returning to when considering the current state of communications and information management — or “reality engineering,” as it is perhaps now best described.

I found it interesting, and I’m sharing it here in case others find value in it as well — and to prompt a discussion about what this moment means for the communications profession.

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For most of modern history, communications could plausibly claim to be a secondary discipline. Events happened; communications followed. Power resided elsewhere — in institutions, markets, governments — and communications helped interpret, explain, or justify what had already occurred.

That story no longer fits the world we’re in.

Today, communications increasingly operates upstream of reality itself. Narratives no longer merely describe the world; they participate in bringing particular versions of the world into being. In many cases, they do so faster — and with fewer constraints — than the institutions ostensibly responsible for governing outcomes.

To understand what’s actually happening to communications, we need to move beyond frameworks built around persuasion, messaging, or even narrative. We need a model that treats communication as causal, not representational.

The concept that best captures this shift is hyperstition.

Hyperstition and the End of Descriptive Communication

Hyperstition describes ideas that make themselves real.

Not because they are accurate. Not because they are proven. But because once they circulate widely enough, they enter feedback loops with belief, behavior, attention, and institutions that produce the conditions they claim to describe.

A narrative is introduced. It recruits believers. Those believers act differently — investing, organizing, voting, hiring, regulating, consuming. Those actions generate artifacts that resemble evidence: policies, headlines, market movements, institutional reactions. The narrative now appears less speculative and more factual. The loop tightens.

At no point does universal belief need to occur. Hyperstition does not require consensus. It simply requires sufficient coordination.

This is why modern communications feels so strange when judged by older standards. Fact-checking doesn’t stop narratives that have already begun to reorganize incentives. Debunking often amplifies the very frames it seeks to neutralize. Persuasion loses relevance once belief is no longer the primary bottleneck.

What matters instead is whether a story becomes operational.

Shared Fictions as Substrate

This dynamic builds on the concept of shared fictions explored by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens and Homo Deus: that large-scale human cooperation depends on shared concepts, like money, law, states, and corporations — entities that exist only insofar as we collectively act as if they do.

Hyperstition extends this logic from maintenance to production.

Shared fictions once changed slowly, constrained by institutions, norms, and media gate keepers. Today those constraints are weaker. Information flows faster. Trust is thinner. Platforms reward engagement rather than coherence. As a result, new fictions can form, propagate, and harden before institutions have time to respond.

Under these conditions, reality itself becomes actively contestable terrain, and communications is no longer a practice that sits atop a stable substrate. It is increasingly one of the primary ways that substrate gets reshaped.

Negativity as an Accelerator

One of the least examined forces in this system is the structural negativity bias in modern journalism, which still plays a critical role in validating realities for influential audiences.

This is an incentive analysis rather than a moral claim. Journalists operate in an environment defined by constant exposure to actors attempting to bend reality to their advantage. Add to that the economic fragility of the media industry and the professional penalty for being wrong in public, and a certain hardened skepticism becomes not only understandable but rational.

Modern journalism evolved to surface threat, abuse of power, and breakdown — a vital function in a stable public sphere. But when that orientation toward threat is combined with platform economics that reward urgency, outrage, and virality, negativity becomes more than vigilance. It becomes an amplification engine.

Negative narratives travel faster. They trigger stronger emotional responses. They demand institutional reaction — and generate follow-on coverage when those reactions occur.

From a hyperstitional perspective, this is exactly the loop you would design if your goal were to accelerate reality production.

Importantly, belief is not required. Circulation is enough.

Journalists do not need to endorse a narrative to strengthen it. Repetition, framing, and escalation are sufficient. Even skeptical coverage can function as fuel — especially when it compels visible response from institutions.

This is why certain narratives prove so difficult to extinguish. They are not sustained by belief alone, but by professional norms that privilege exposure over proportionality.

The Publicist President

Seen through this lens, Donald Trump is less an aberration than a structural preview.

Trump’s defining skill is reality imposition through publicity. As America’s first publicist president, he has demonstrated an intuitive understanding that attention precedes legitimacy, repetition creates truth-effects, and negative coverage is coverage. With a higher tolerance for reputational pain, scandal ceases to be a cost and becomes a distribution strategy. Institutional pushback becomes not a refutation, but validation.

Trump does not seek to persuade audiences and seemingly sees no need to try to win arguments. Instead, he makes his frames unavoidable. Media organizations, acting in good faith, complete the hyperstitional loop:

• a claim is made,

• outrage follows,

• institutions respond,

• the claim gains reality-weight.

This serves not as a demonstration of propaganda overpowering truth, but publicity overpowering deliberation.

The lesson here is uncomfortable but important: in a hyperstitional environment, skepticism can be its own kind of fuel.

The Drift Toward the Dark Forest

There is a second-order effect of negativity-accelerated hyperstition that is less visible, but more consequential.

As public discourse becomes increasingly punishing — where visibility invites attack, misinterpretation, or reputational risk — rational actors adapt.

This is where Dark Forest logic becomes relevant (most famously articulated in Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest, but also in Nadia Asparouhova’s recent Antimemetics): in an environment where exposure reliably attracts hostility, the safest strategy is silence.

Applied to communications, the implication is stark. Actors who are epistemically cautious, institutionally responsible, long-term oriented, or coordination-minded increasingly conclude that public communications spaces are not worth the downside risk.

So they withdraw.

Serious sense-making migrates into private environments like Slack and group chats, closed research communities, curated newsletters, invite-only conversations, and off-platform coordination networks. Public discourse does not disappear — but it becomes selectively hollowed out.

What remains visible skews toward those insulated from reputational damage, optimized for outrage, or actively seeking attention. This is not because “the worst people are loudest,” but because the system selects for those traits.

Hyperstition continues to operate in private spaces — but more slowly, more quietly, and with far greater downstream impact.

The result is a widening gap between the public reality we argue about and the private reality where decisions are actually formed.

This gap is increasingly felt as confusion, distrust, and the sense that outcomes arrive pre-decided — because they often are.

Communications After the Public Sphere

Taken together, these dynamics suggest something unsettling: We are drifting toward an information environment where public discourse is optimized for spectacle, while coordination happens elsewhere.

• Negativity bias accelerates hyperstition.

• Hyperstition degrades trust.

• Degraded trust drives withdrawal.

• Withdrawal darkens the forest.

The risk here is not merely misinformation but epistemic segregation — a world in which shared reality thins to the point that democratic deliberation, market legitimacy, and institutional credibility begin to erode.

The communications profession is not solely responsible but now sits at the center of these dynamics.

That is not a position of blame. It is a position of leverage.

Implications for Communicators

If communications is no longer primarily descriptive, but reality-producing, then the profession must confront a different set of responsibilities.

A few implications follow.

1. Communications is loop design, not message delivery.
The unit of work is no longer the message. It is the feedback loop — how narratives recruit belief, trigger action, generate artifacts, and reinforce themselves. Good communicators design loops deliberately. Bad ones stumble into them accidentally.

2. Negativity is powerful — and dangerous.
Endemic negative framing is not neutral. It accelerates reality formation. Communicators must decide when escalation is justified — and when it simply feeds dynamics that hollow out the commons. Restraint is not silence; it is proportionality.

3. Visibility now carries asymmetric risk.
Public communications environments penalize uncertainty, humility, and provisional thinking. Institutions that want to preserve shared reality must actively create safe spaces for public sense-making rather than outsourcing all deliberation to private forums.

4. Hyperstition can be constructive or corrosive.
Shared fictions are unavoidable. The question is whether they expand our capacity to coordinate, or monetize our inability to do so. That distinction should become a first-order ethical test.

5. The future of communications is infrastructural.
This is no longer a craft concerned only with words. It is about the architecture of belief, trust, and coordination.

As communicators, we are no longer just storytellers. We are, whether we admit it or not, architects of shared realities.

The uncomfortable truth is that reality is no longer simply there to be explained. It is constantly being designed, constructed, and contested. Communications professionals are not observers of this process. We are participants in it.

If communications has become one of the primary ways reality gets made, are we prepared to recognize what that makes us: not just amplifiers, but stewards — for better or worse — of the realities we help create?